A Big Waste of Time is powered by caffeine, mild outrage, and the box scores. Let’s get into it.
The Cubs Just Turned Wrigley Field Into a Video Game
I don’t know what the Padres did to make the baseball gods this angry, but 23-3 is not a final score, that’s a phone number. The Cubs completed a sweep of San Diego on Wednesday by hitting eight home runs and scoring their most runs in a home game since 1977, which is impressive considering disco was still a going concern back then.
Dansby Swanson decided to have a video game day, going deep three times — including a grand slam — for a career-high 8 RBI. That’s the second-most RBI ever recorded by someone batting ninth, which tells you everything about how deep this lineup went. He’d also gone back-to-back-homer the day before, so at this point Swanson isn’t in a slump, he’s in a simulation.
Meanwhile poor Walker Buehler gave up nine runs in four innings, and the Padres were so far underwater that they had their catcher, Rodolfo Duran, pitch the final two innings. When your backstop is closing out a 20-run loss, it’s not a bullpen game, it’s a cry for help. Fernando Tatis Jr. even had his 23-game on-base streak snapped, which feels almost beside the point when your team just got dropped 23-3 by the wind at Wrigley.
Cubs fans, enjoy this one. Frame it. Laminate it. You’re going to need it in October when Tyler Ferguson gives up a walk-off.
USA Survives Bosnia, a Man Down, and a Very Confused Referee
The USMNT punched their ticket to the Round of 16 with a 2-0 win over Bosnia and Herzegovina — their first World Cup knockout win since 2002, which is a sentence I genuinely didn’t expect to type in my lifetime. Folarin Balogun opened the scoring right before halftime, looking like the best player on the pitch, and then in the 64th minute the referee sent him off for what looked, in real time, like a guy simply putting his foot down during a normal 50-50 challenge.
Even neutral observers were baffled. Fox’s own referee analyst called the VAR review a stretch, and Bosnia’s own coach basically shrugged it off as an accident. So did the USMNT just fold and play out the clock down a man against a team that had already knocked out Italy and Wales in penalty shootouts to even get here? Nope. Malik Tillman drilled a gorgeous free kick in the 82nd minute to make it 2-0, and the U.S. defended like a team that actually wanted this. Whatever you think about the red card — and I think it stunk — a young USMNT team taking a bad break and increasing their lead instead of white-knuckling a 1-0 win says a lot about where this group is right now. Belgium is up next. Buckle in.
Trump’s Net Worth Is Up $2 Billion and Somehow That’s Not the Craziest Part
So here’s a fun one. Donald Trump’s financial disclosures show his businesses pulled in more than $2 billion in income in 2025 alone — more than triple the year before — and his overall net worth has ballooned from roughly $2.3 billion before he took office to somewhere north of $6 billion now. The biggest driver isn’t Mar-a-Lago or the golf courses, it’s crypto: hundreds of millions in royalties tied to his meme coin, plus proceeds from World Liberty Financial, the crypto venture he and his sons launched.
Let that sit for a second. A sitting president launched his own cryptocurrency days before his inauguration, personally profits every time it’s traded, and openly talks up stocks and trades in public. We really have never seen anything quite like this from an American president. Past presidents put their assets in a blind trust specifically to avoid the appearance — or reality — of cashing in on the office. This administration didn’t just skip the blind trust, they seem to have set up a drive-thru window instead.
Here’s my actual question, and I mean this sincerely: where is the emoluments clause in all of this? Where are the Republicans who used to talk about fiscal responsibility and clean government? Be the party of Lincoln again, guys. You don’t have to agree with me on policy to agree that a president shouldn’t be getting personally richer off decisions he’s making in the Oval Office. This isn’t a both-sides thing. This is a “we set up ethics rules after Watergate for a reason” thing.
Quick refresher, since I keep bringing it up: the emoluments clause isn’t actually one clause, it’s two, and neither one is in the 14th Amendment — they’re baked into the original 1787 Constitution. The Foreign Emoluments Clause (Article I, Section 9) says a federal officeholder can’t accept gifts, payments, or titles from a foreign government without Congress signing off. The Domestic Emoluments Clause (Article II) says the president can’t take extra payments from the U.S. government or the states beyond their salary. The whole point, straight from the Founders, was to stop foreign money or domestic favors from quietly buying influence over an American president. It’s exactly why past presidents parked their assets in blind trusts before taking office — so nobody could credibly claim they were cashing in. Whether any of this technically crosses the legal line is genuinely disputed in the courts, but the plain-language concern is simple: the president’s decisions shouldn’t come with a side of personal profit.
Oh, and Also, He’s Flying Around on a Plane Qatar Gave Him
I almost forgot to mention this because there’s just so much happening, but: Trump took his first flight this week on a brand-new Air Force One — a $400 million Boeing 747 gifted to the United States by the government of Qatar. Repainted in his preferred navy, red, and gold color scheme, with lie-flat leather seats, wood paneling, and the presidential seal stitched into the seatbelts, because apparently regular seatbelts weren’t presidential enough. Trump called it “maybe the greatest commercial plane ever built” and said the U.S. “couldn’t build a plane like this,” which is a wild thing to say about a jet a foreign monarchy handed you for free.
To be fair, the plane was formally gifted to the Air Force, not to Trump personally, and it’s meant to be a stopgap until Boeing finishes the actual new Air Force One jets around 2028. But ethics watchdogs have been raising alarms about this since it was first announced, for reasons that should be obvious: it’s one of the largest gifts a foreign government has ever given the U.S. government, from a country with deep business ties to the Trump Organization, at a moment when Trump’s family is actively negotiating deals in the Gulf. You don’t need a law degree to see why “the emoluments clause” keeps coming up in the same sentence as “airplane from Qatar.”
What a week to be a fan of institutional norms.
Birthright Citizenship, the 14th Amendment, and Now… Banning Pregnant Tourists?
The Supreme Court ruled this week that yes, obviously, the Constitution guarantees birthright citizenship to children born on U.S. soil — striking down Trump’s day-one executive order trying to end it. Chief Justice Roberts wrote that the framers of the 14th Amendment “extended that promise to every free-born person in this land,” which, respectfully, is not exactly a hidden legal mystery. I’ve read the amendment. Most of us have. It says what it says. Genuinely can’t figure out why this wasn’t 9-0 — it ended up 6-3, and even that took some legal gymnastics from Justice Kavanaugh to get there.
For anyone who hasn’t actually read it: the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, right after the Civil War, largely to guarantee citizenship to formerly enslaved people. The line everyone’s fighting about is the Citizenship Clause: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” Translation — if you’re born here, you’re a citizen, full stop, with one narrow exception carved out over a century ago for children of foreign diplomats. That’s it. That’s the whole controversy. The Supreme Court settled this exact question back in 1898 in a case called Wong Kim Ark, and this week’s ruling just reaffirmed it.
And how did the administration respond to losing at the Supreme Court? Not by dropping it. By pivoting to a new idea: barring pregnant women from entering the country altogether. White House advisor Stephen Miller floated the idea directly on Fox News, DOJ ordered prosecutors to prioritize “birth tourism” cases, and at least one member of Congress is introducing a bill about it. All of this is aimed at a phenomenon that, by the government’s own estimates, accounts for well under 1% of U.S. births in a given year.
So just to summarize where we are: the Court said the Constitution means what it says, and the response was to start talking about screening pregnant travelers at the border. Yes. This is the world we live in. Shaking my head.
The One Bright Spot: Baywatch Is Back
After all that, here’s your palate cleanser. Fox just dropped the first teaser for the Baywatch reboot, and it’s coming in January. Stephen Amell is stepping into the role of Hobie Buchannon, son of the original Mitch, and a few legacy cast members are returning to hand off the red swimsuits to a new generation. Is it going to be prestige television? Almost certainly not. Am I going to watch every single slow-motion beach sprint? Absolutely.
Go ahead and laugh. Between blowout wins, controversial red cards, a $400 million plane from Qatar, and a Supreme Court fighting off birth-tourism border patrols, I think we’ve all earned a little bit of nonsense on the beach.
That’s it for this edition of A Big Waste of Time. See you next week.